Moral theology, moralism, and spiritual growth

Lately I've noticed a style of moral theologizing in which moral uprightness, understood as external conformity with precepts that can sometimes be quite technical, is presented as a sine qua non not just of the Christian life itself but even of—well, basic credibility. I don't want to call that Pharisaism, exactly; the precepts involved are typically more important, objectively speaking, than many of those the Pharisees thought important. But we have here a kind of moralism particularly seductive for highly intelligent Catholics who, if they succumb to it, thereby become prone to impugn the character of those who disagree with them about one or more of the technical precepts at issue. Such moralism is a problem for both "the Right" and "the Left," i.e. for the rigorists and the laxists. It is important that moral theology not become moralism because, if and when it does, it becomes at least as much an obstacle as an aid to Christian spiritual growth. Besides the uncharity it encourages in those who practice it, it has the (often unintended) effect of presenting Christian morality as a set of rules that, in the harder cases at least, most people would be no more able to understand than to live up to. My purpose here is to illustrate what I mean by considering how a recent moral controversy has developed online.

Consider a well-known case of public moral disagreement. In 2005 Terri Schaivo, a still-young Florida woman who had been in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) for over a decade, was euthanized by the will of her husband Michael. She was killed by the legally authorized withdrawal of the tube providing her with "artifical nutrition and hydration" (ANH); it took her less than two weeks to die of dehydration. The Vatican and most pro-lifers, including yours truly, regarded that action as murder even while it was only being proposed; politically, an ultimately futile effort was made to override the local judge and secure federal intervention to delay or prevent Terri's death. Along with not a few other bishops, the local bishop had seemed unable to issue clear moral guidance on the matter, which was a problem because Terri and her family of origin were Catholic and, as such, her family had sought support from the Church in their effort to prevent Terri's death. Partly if not wholly because of that unclarity, the US bishops sent a dubium, a formal "question," to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about the sort of case that the Schaivo case was. You can read the CDF's responsum ('CDF-R' for short), which came last year, here.

If it isn't obvious to those capable of understanding the text of CDF-R, it ought to be obvious that the document warranted the judgment by Catholics that Terri's killing was, objectively speaking, murder. As I argued last year, the principles enunciated in CDF-R were a positive and authoritative development in Church teaching that had begun under John Paul II. Received and taught as intended, CDF-R would have the practical effect of making Catholic health-care professionals and families unwilling to see ANH as "extraordinary" care in cases like Terri's, and thus less willing to withhold or withdraw it in PVS cases generally than many Catholics had been in the past. But that's not what seems to have happened. Indeed, few minds seem to have changed one way or the other.

What seems to have happened instead is this. One side tries to spin CDF-R into practical irrelevance, consigning any better reception for the document than that to pro-life "extremism" (i.e., wingnuts); the other tries to depict as murderers, by formal if remote cooperation, anybody who had broadcasted the opinion that Terri Schaivo's killing was morally permissible. The former instances the moralism of the left; the latter, the moralism of the right. Each side impugns not only the arguments, but the personal credibility, of the other. I find that disturbing no matter which side it comes from.

To me at least, the moralism of the left is clear in how the slowly but steadily shrinking "progressive" Catholic intelligentsia has received CDF-R. Anybody who cares to learn what that reception has been has only to search the online archives of Commonweal and the National Catholic Reporter. But I shall save everybody time by focusing just on the article I've just linked above, the one that spins CDF-R into "practical irrelevance." I shall save myself time and space just by linking my detailed critique of that article here for you to read for yourselves. But it is necessary for me to add a couple of things in this post.

One is that the author of that article is Capuchin Brother Daniel Sulmasy, MD, PhD, one of the most influential, if not the most influential, Catholic bioethicists in the U.S. As such, he has a reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy that is not entirely undeserved. I have heard him speak myself, at a lecture he gave in a Catholic parish near Duke University a few weeks ago; to my surprise, the talk turned out to be a 45-minute crash course in bioethics for lay Catholics. As a former bioethics lecturer myself, and one who is thoroughly informed about magisterial teaching on bioethics, I could find nothing objectionable in principle in Sulmasy's talk. But during the Q & A, he cleverly sidestepped the Terri Schaivo case. He pointed out, rightly, that ANH can be extraordinary and thus optional care, which is why John Paul II permissibly refused it when he was nearing death. Sulmasy also pointed out that a number of conditions need to be fulfilled if we are not to count ANH as extraordinary. There was no time to discuss that claim with him further, but I for one had no need to. A reading of his article and my critique indicates that he frames the conditions in such a way that Terri Schaivo's murder might have been justified. I leave it to readers to find the loophole.

This is the sort of laxism that the Jesuits, e.g., were often charged with even in the days before their vow of obedience to the pope was honored more in the breach than in the observance. It was said that the Jesuits construed moral norms designed to cover difficult cases in such a fashion as to license behavior almost indistinguishable from what one could expect from the heathen. I don't think that was usually true in the past; but it has certainly become so today, at least in those areas of life where prevailing secular morality has itself grown more lax. Such laxism is moralism because it suggests, without ever actually saying, that external conformity to "the rules," construed in a plausibly minimalist way, suffices to make everything OK. My own life experience, with the present sort of case and others, indicates that that is often not the case. And Sulmasy's brand of left-wing moralism becomes a bludgeon when those who reject the laxism are accused, in effect, of being somehow beyond the pale. You can see how subtly Sulmasy does that himself in his article, but he's not even the most egregious example. I myself have been accused of "Jansenism" for holding that the now-standard "three conditions" on counting an act as a mortal sin should be tightened up to take account of culpably malformed conscience. Among Catholics who know and care what Jansenism is, or was, that sort of charge functions as mere ad hominem even when it is not so intended.

And that brings me round to the right-wing moralism I've observed—in this case about the Schaivo case, but there are many others. Let's assume what I've already conceded: that what brought about Terri Schaivo's death was an act of murder. Let's even assume, for argument's sake, that writers who influenced others to disagree with that judgment thereby "cooperated" in some remote fashion with Terri's death. Does this mean that any such person is actually guilty of murder by "formal cooperation?" Clearly not. It depends on the influence they intended to have, the influence they actually had, the degree of their own culpability for their rejecting the moral truth in this matter, and the degree of others' culpability in sharing that error without having themselves done the actual deed. Trying or even succeeding in getting others to agree with them about the moral status of Terri's death is as bad as murder only if they were actually trying to induce somebody to yank the tube or, failing that, were disposed to yank the tube themselves if given the chance to do so. Merely contributing to a climate of erroneous moral thinking about a proposed course of action is not the same thing as being guilty of the wrong action itself. It is to be guilty of leading others into error about the applicable moral precepts. Just how guilty one is for doing that will, in turn, depend on how guilty one is for holding the original error, which only God knows, and how important the matter is. There is no one-size-fits-all human judgment to make here. But you'd never know that from what some pro-lifers say.

The kind of moralism I'm lamenting is not the only kind. It is not even the only kind among laxists and rigorists. What I'm lamenting is an over-emphasis on external conformity to technical moral precepts that few people even understand well enough to apply reliably on their own. It is possible to interpret such a precept too rigorously without thereby joining the wingnuts. It is possible to interpret such a precept too loosely without thereby setting oneself on the slippery slope to hell. Often, people who err on either side are guilty of nothing worse than not yet having learned enough about the full implications of the Gospel. For them, overcoming that problem is simply a matter of becoming more Christlike—not of picking the right side of a technical debate among moral theologians. To suppose otherwise is to make one's own spiritual growth more difficult.

The Pope's blow against intolerance

Now that there's been time to reflect, you just gotta love it.

St. Patrick and the TSA

The Transportation Security Administration is supposed to protect air travelers from terrorism. Given the results of various tests since 2002, its utility probably lies less in keeping weapons off planes than in reassuring, by its clumsy intrusiveness, a public anxious to be reassured. My confirmation saint, St. Patrick, also reassures me. By most accounts, such as Thomas Cahill's, he composed his justly loved Breastplate prayer to ward off "the spells of women and smiths and druids" as well as of demons directly. Believing I faced no specific, unseen personal enemies, I used to use it less as self-defense and more as just a beautiful prayer. I was wrong. Now I use it for both purposes. On my spiritual journey, he's an important part of my own personal TSA.

I picked "Patrick" as my confirmation name when I was 10 because even then I had an inchoate sense that I had a vocation to teach people about the Trinity, specifically. As crude an image as it had to be for his illiterate, heathen audience, I could not get his three-leaf clover out of my mind. I still can't. Every time I see clover I am reminded of my vocation. I doubt I have fulfilled it as intended.

That's why I pray with the Breastplate and many similar aids. To fulfill my vocation as intended, which is doubtless a greater thing than I see, I must press on with my spiritual journey with as much protection as possible against whatever would terrorize me out of it. As the world grows ever more nihilistic, we all need to be doing that. You have many TSA agents to pick from. Let us thank God for the one we celebrate today.

Redeeming secularity

When I'm feeling more desperate than usual, I like to re-read Jean-Pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence, a spiritual classic available in a range of editions and translations. In one of them, the work is entitled The Sacrament of the Present Moment. I cannot recommend that volume highly enough; on me, a careful reading has the effect of calming my silly fears and inducing me to rest in God's love. Beyond circumstances, what's brought it to my mind again is a marvelous post of the same title by Fr. Steven Freeman. That post has also set me pondering anew a seemingly intractable problem I've always had with being a layman in the world. The problem has a simple solution, to be sure. But the simple solution is by no means easy.

Ever since I made a more-or-less adult commitment of faith, I haven't wanted in my heart to be a layman at all. As a high-school senior, I resolved internally to become a philosophy major in college as preparation for the seminary. Of course I didn't tell that to my parents or teachers, because I didn't think the resistance I could expect if I did would be a price worth paying. It was the Catholic Church in the 1970s, after all. I had been sexually abused by a priest a few years earlier; still more to the point, priests and religious had been bolting in droves, and the faithful remnant was openly indisposed to encourage the young to plunge themselves into the mess. It didn't get any better once I got to Columbia. Most of the priests I met were progs who didn't think me prog enough; the rest were either trads who didn't think me trad enough, or just plain didn't care. My disgust caused me to flirt seriously with Orthodoxy before I fell in with a crowd of older, lay Catholic intellectuals. As I neared graduation, the few vocation directors willing to hear me on the merits neither offered nor suggested spiritual direction to help me with the discipline of celibacy. They were rather keen, however, on reminding me that I had to repay my college debt before any of them would consider me. I ended up getting married. I had concluded that that was what God wanted for me, as distinct from what I had wanted for myself. And who was I to complain? I now had a wife who loved me; and I loved her back, in my own immature way.

The question for me then became: how could I do some sort of "ministry," my chief and indeed only abiding occupational interest, as a married Catholic man? I had committed myself to a state in life in which earning a certain level of income was likely to be far more important than how I earned that income. I did not relish that part of marriage and family. Still, I was fortunate in being married to a woman who understood me and facilitated, in every way, my arduous trek through the doctoral program in philosophy at Penn. And despite using NFP to conceive a child, we did not conceive, only adopting a baby privately after ten years of marriage. For that decade, I had had the luxury of avoiding the question how to earn a respectable living. I taught part-time as an adjunct and did some paid freelance writing. My scope for self-indulgence was such that I even got to run for Congress in 1988. The downside was that I also got to remain a superannuated adolescent. Some of that resolved itself naturally after I got my PhD and began teaching full-time in Catholic institutions. But soon enough, choices I made in response to stressful events destroyed all that. I'm now twice-divorced, tethered to paying child support. That has only raised the question of "ministry" anew for me. And I have yet to resolve that question. I still don't want a secular "career" any more than I ever did. I want a vocation focused on the only matters in which I have an abiding interest for their own sake: those having directly and explicitly to do with the truths about God derivable from both natural reason and his own self-revelation. Indeed, I'm such a Catholic nerd that I have a very hard time understanding why most intelligent, orthodox Catholics don't want the same for themselves.

When I've discussed this with people close to me, including the occasional spiritual director, the responses I've gotten are remarkably similar. They point out that most Christians, including most good and holy Christians, are neither clergy nor theologians. They point out what that entails: most of us can and ought to serve God well in the course of ordinary human life, without being clergy or theologians. They cite the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to remind me that I can be a "priest" in that generic sense in which all Christians are called to be priests. They gently remind me that I have no good reason to think myself too good or special for that. And of course they are right. I have no rebuttal to offer. But my heart does not change; my real interests and aspirations remain as they are, which is what they have always been. I pursue my real interests in my spare time; this blog is a part of that. I look on my unfulfilled aspirations as a sign from God that his work-in-progress known as Mike Liccione needs a lot more work in order to be credible again in something called "ministry."

But, the voices ask, what if I'm just still not "getting it?" Fr. Freeman's meditation poses the challenge starkly:

The Eucharist reveals Christ to us. But as Fr. Alexander Schmemann always noted, the Eucharist not only reveals Christ to us, it also reveals the true nature of creation to us. Bread can no longer be the same if Christ has taken it and made it His body. It is always possible, indeed it has already happened, that we build a fence around that sacred moment and confine it to the liturgy itself. Outside the service, everything returns to “normal and ordinary,” and the Orthodox become as secular as every Christian around them. This is a denial of the Orthodox faith. God is “everywhere present and filling all things,” thus there is no “normal and ordinary,” no “secular.” Everything is changed. There is no eating of bread that is not a communion with God. There is no encounter with a tree that is not an encounter with the hard wood of the cross, the “weapon of peace.” In Jeremiah (23:23-24) we read:

Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.

We do not have a “neutral zone” where we live apart from God. Instead, we have zones of ignorance, where believing Christians live as unbelievers, awaiting their next attendance at a “God permitted” zone. No, the truth is that God has united Himself not only to humanity in the incarnation, but to matter itself. Man is the “microcosm” according to the Fathers, a “little cosmos” in himself. This is most fully and completely true in Christ, who has truly summed up the cosmos within Himself. Thus we look forward to the redemption and resurrection of the whole created order and not just man (Romans 8).

Thus we are never separated from God who is freely with us, but also giving Himself to us in everything around us. This is no profession of pantheism. God has not become everything else. But everything else holds the possibility of encounter with God as surely as the holy water within the Church or every sacrament He has given us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

In the combox to another post, Fr. Steven tells one reader something that he could just as well tell me:

The church doesn’t miss out on having any of us as priests. If I die tomorrow the Kingdom of God will continue to exist. The only priesthood is that of Christ. My merely human talents add nothing to the Church whatsoever. The treasure within us is the gift of God. Seek God first, don’t worry about the priesthood. It is the priesthood of Christ you need to encounter.

Well, yes. There is no "neutral zone" for a Christian. For those who stay the course of sanctification, all is holy, all is redeemed. So, the challenge I confront is to encounter the "priesthood of Christ," and join myself to it, without being able to spend the bulk of my time dealing explicitly with the things that priests and theologians, as such, deal with. I really don't experience that encounter subjectively, but I acknowledge it happens whenever I offer myself, my actions, and my sufferings to the Lord in complete detachment from everything but him and his commandments of love. Perhaps that's all there is to becoming his priestlings once we leave the church building with the Body of Christ in our bellies. I suppose there isn't much alternative anyhow, if I am to be immersed in our world's secularity, spending the bulk of my time and energy pretty much as most people do.

But that's still not my heart. I still have to force myself to thank him for being put on such a path. Which means I'm not really grateful. Which means I'm not really offering my heart. And what does that do to my own priesthood as a believer? I'd rather not think about that. Of course the solution is simple: "Say yes, joyfully." Alas, easier said than done. My prayer this Triduum is to be shown a way out of the box I'm in. I can only hope that's the right prayer.

Quotation of the day

"I like to attend meetings of the Catholic Theological Society in order to keep up with the latest trends in liberal Protestantism."

—Protestant theologian Robert Jenson.

Theology and economy

“The cross and resurrection are the eternal dialogue of Father and Son as projected on to the screen of history, what it looks like in history. If you want to know what the Trinity looks like be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified: Ecce homo."

Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2005), 100.

HT to Inhabitatio Dei.

The fans and the mob

For reasons I won't waste your time speculating about, my mind returns every Palm Sunday to the contrast between the crowd's adulation of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey with the venom of the mob calling for his crucifixion before Pilate a few days later. One thing I'm sure of is that both crowds are figurae, types, of own souls as they oscillate between grace and sin, between living, joyful faith and preference for the world's way of doing things. We welcome Jesus as our savior, yes; we also shout "Crucify him!" whenever we sin seriously, as most of us have done. I'd love to help do a movie in which a couple who had greeted Jesus with hosannas went on to join the crowd yelling for Barabbas' release instead of Jesus'. A plot premise would have them desperately poor, ripe to take a few shekels from the high priest's henchman for joining the mob. I have an old friend who could write a good script for such a movie. Of course there's always the matter of raising the money...

Which brings me to my main point. The Jews weren't ready to accept the idea that God could come to them in person as a man who, sans army, formal education, or even money, would challenge their religious leadership rather than the occupying power. You can hardly blame them; they thought as people normally would. The Anointed One they expected would be a political savior. He would eject the Romans by force and turn Israel into a glorious earthly kingdom where other nations would worship God just as they did. That's what the Apostles hoped for too, which is probably why Judas was disappointed enough to betray Jesus when it had become clear that wasn't going to be the script. They didn't start to get it until Jesus appeared to them after the Resurrection; they didn't even understand, until well after the fact, that he had actually prophesied the whole thing. My friends, the Apostles are us.

We instinctively assume that good fortune consists in our obtaining the blessings the rest of the world considers blessings too. That's the movie we want to see, or better, to make. When we don't see it or have the wherewithal to make it, then God's script for us can be a bitter disappointment indeed. In response, some of us betray him and are lost, temporarily or permanently; many abandon him when the path of fidelity seems likely to yield, at best, a cruel joke. We return only when some grace, foreseeable yet unforeseen, brings us back round. Rare are the Marys and Johns who stand steadfast by him at the foot of the Cross. And even they often don't get to see, until their own passing, much of the Great Light to follow.

This Palm Sunday, I pray for the wisdom and courage to follow the script God is writing for me. I don't want to be tempted, any more than I already am, to leave the fans for the mob.

Rewriting the book on excommunication

Among Catholics, the loudest school of thought about excommunicating people is the "progressive." The progs find the exercise presumptively neanderthal, typically useless, and often counterproductive. If done at all, it should only be done to people who are publicly and pertinaciously un-PC. Thus, I've heard occasional praise from progs for the 1962 excommunication of segregationists in New Orleans, and for the Italian hierarchy's excommunication of certain Mafia types. But that's about it. Heaven forfend that anybody should be excommunicated for pertinaciously denying some de fide doctrine—i.e., for heresy—or for brave public acts such as voting against a partial-birth abortion ban or doing a womyn's ordination. Since progs are still somewhat influential in chanceries and very influential in Catholic universities, they have most bishops pretty cowed about the whole thing. But that not only should change; it can change, given leadership that is competent and creative as well as courageous. Believe it or not, we've actually got that.

Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis has just formally decreed the excommunication of three women involved in that pseudo-ordination last year about which I wrote at the time. Of Burke's decree, Dr. Ed Peters, a top-notch canon lawyer from whom I learn often, writes:

I would like to say that Abp. Raymond Burke's excommunication of three women who recently participated in a pseudo-ordination in Saint Louis is a "text-book illustration" of how (non-judicial) excommunication is supposed to be applied in the Church today, but I can't say that. Why not? Because Abp. Burke's attention to juridic details and his provisions for the pastoral care of the people entrusted to his care so exceed what the textbooks teach, that it is the textbooks that must copy from him, not him from the textbooks.

That ought to lend some encouragement to those of us who think bishops have got awfully woolly about excommunication and need to do a bit more of it for the good of people's souls, including the souls of those excommunicated. Why should we all care about that?

As I've written before:

There certainly are quarters of the Church in this country where the virtue of faith, and the orthodoxy on which it depends, are understood and fostered. But such a witness is severely undermined by the degree to which the bishops allow dissent to go unpunished. E.g., even personally orthodox bishops such as Egan of New York and Wuerl of DC refuse to withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who openly defy Church teaching on points that the Pope himself has indicated are non-negotiable. Other personally orthodox bishops, such as Flynn of the Twin Cities or O'Malley of Boston, refuse to discipline heterodox theologians on the faculties of universities over which they have at least nominal authority. And then there's the fact, so widely known as to be rarely mentioned, that on the literally vital matter of contraception, lay Catholics are allowed to do exactly as they please—which in most cases involves rejecting the constant, irreformable teaching of the Church. Even Catholic media are caught up in the corresponding ambiguity: we have the National Catholic Register, yes, but we also have the National Catholic Reporter. Of course it is well-known, among those who give thought to such matters, that the Catholic Church in America is polarized. But what is not so well understood is that the very persistence of that polarization strengthens the heterodox sides of the spectrum. Once again, it gives out the impression that orthodoxy is optional: not merely for American Catholics as Americans—which is and ought to be unexceptionable—but as Catholics. That makes it impossible for the virtue of faith to be widely fostered and understood among rank-and-file Catholics.

If we get more bishops doing the sort of thing Burke is doing, the virtue of faith can once again be fostered and understood wide-scale, not just here and there. To that end, I once again recommend his brilliant, peer-reviewed academic article about Catholic politicians who support abortion "rights."

New heresies to savor

Check out this priest's list, now making the rounds. Hilarious.

I can't resist offering a sample:

"OCTORBITISTS – Note the different spelling. This is not the Octoberfests, a little known cult that involves the drinking of great amounts of beer in October but the Octorbitists. Oct, meaning the number eight and orbits referring to path the earth makes around the sun. This sect only recognizes the Church for about eight years usually only stopping in the parking lot Monday through Friday to drop their children off for school. They do not recognize the spiritual role of the Church but submit to its authority in teaching math, science, and the making of collages."

McCain's best hope

Think two Democratic cats, and you get the idea:

"There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit
Till excepting their nails and the tips of their tails
Instead of two cats there weren't any."

HT to Michael Hirsh.

From Durufle's Requiem: Agnus Dei

HT to Billy Ockham.

The miraculous and the explanatory

With his customary alacrity and grace, Scott Carson has replied to my critique of his critique of the Vatican's use of medical evidence in classifying certain events as miracles. I'm actually quite pleased that he chose to focus on the role of explanation in all this. That choice gives me an excuse to redeploy a concept I developed as the core of my doctoral thesis: the ontological category of the "positively mysterious."

A positive mystery P is something that is intelligible (an epistemological feature of it) but not necessitated—which is an ontological feature of P. That means that, in principle at least, P is explicable in a way that is complete for purposes of the appropriate sort of explanation but is not exhaustively explicable, as if P were explicable-in-principle in a way that would show that P had to be so rather than not. Obviously, what all that means in turn depends crucially on how the concept of explanation is itself deployed. I shall deploy it by way of arguing that miracles, properly so-called and if any, are cases of the positively mysterious. Having done that, I shall argue that Scott's critique misses the point of the Vatican's miracle-vetting process.

When discussing the miraculous, there are two main questions to answer at the outset, or at least to get as clear as we can get about them: (1) What does it mean to call some event a miracle? (2) When may we count some event as a miracle in that sense? Answering (1) leads us toward what analytical philosophers call the "intension," or the conceptual content, of the term 'miracle'; whereas (2) is about how to decide when to count some event as falling under the concept of miracle, as belonging to the "extension" of the concept. Now, since the occasion for this whole discussion is the Vatican's process of miracle-vetting, it must be stipulated that the relevant concept of the miraculous is craftbound. We're not using the term 'miracle' in just any old way in which it can be and has been intelligibly used; rather, we're following (or trying to follow) the Catholic Church's traditional use of it, which is an irreducibly theological one. It would be idle to criticize the Vatican for not answering (2) aright if we are not using the same concept of the miraculous that the Vatican is using for the purpose in question.

One part, but only one part, of the relevant concept of the miraculous is that miracles are "supernatural." Thus, calling a given event a miracle means, among other things, that it is "beyond the order of all created nature," to use one of Aquinas' definitions. To affirm that a miracle is a supernatural event in that sense entails, among other things, that no proposed scientific explanation of the event, if any, could be adequate as an explanation. In such a case, we do not merely happen to lack a scientific explanation in the present; rather, no such explanation would be appropriate to the subject matter and thus useful as an explanation. This is the sense in which I can agree with Scott that "empirical evidence is completely irrelevant to the question of the miraculous in general." If we're using the term 'empirical evidence' just to mean the sort of evidence that natural scientists as such can and do count as evidence, then no such evidence could suffice, even in principle, to establish that such-and-such an event is a miracle—for one cannot use the methods of natural science to establish that anything is actually supernatural. Nor can one legitimately infer just from the absence of a scientific explanation that some empirically observable phenomenon is miraculous. That's also why I don't like the Intelligent-Design movement any more than Scott does: from the fact that we cannot now explain certain features of living things without recourse to intelligent design by a (presumably) supernatural being, it does not follow that we could not do so even in principle. Where Scott and I differ is in the conclusions we draw about how to identify events as miraculous.

He concludes, in effect, that the sort of thing the Vatican does in vetting alleged miracles of healing is wrongheaded. If "empirical evidence is completely irrelevant to the question of the miraculous," then neither the presence nor the absence of associated, empirically observable phenomena is relevant to deciding whether some medically inexplicable cure is miraculous, and the Vatican must therefore be wrong to consult scientists when assessing reports of miracles of healing for their credibility. But that cannot be the right conclusion to draw.

For one thing, it does not because it cannot apply to any and all miracles, and thus to "the miraculous" merely as such. Consider, e.g., that miracle without which, St. Paul says, our "faith is in vain." If Jesus rose bodily from the dead, then the empty tomb could be observed as such and, according to New Testament, was in fact so observed. That is a very much an "empirical" phenomenon—which is why the Shroud of Turin could be the very burial cloth in which Jesus' body was wrapped when it underwent that miraculous transformation entailed by what we call "the Resurrection." But of course, natural science cannot establish that that's what the Shroud is; all natural science can do is rule out some natural explanations and entertain others as (possible) hypotheses. To see the empty tomb or the Shroud as miraculous, the eyes of faith are required. But it must not be said that any and all observable facts are irrelevant to deciding whether to count some event as a miracle. All that can be said is that, if there are miracles that manifest themselves in what's observable, then those observables cannot be adequately explained by the investigatory methods of natural science, and instead require the eyes of faith for adequate explanation. Hence even though, for reasons I've stated, the absence of scientific explanation for certain alleged cures is something to expect if those cures are miraculous, it neither follows nor is true that "empirical" facts, in the sense of "observable" facts, are simply "irrelevant" to identifying some events as miraculous.

All this suggests what I believe ought to be obvious: it is not enough, for purposes of identifying some observable event as a miracle in the relevant sense, to say that it is somehow beyond the order of nature. Things we can observe from within nature must be relevant, and relevant in a certain way. What's relevant here is not just the mere fact that we can observe the event from within nature. It's not even just that certain particular, observable features of the event itself are relevant. What's equally and crucially relevant is the spiritual context in which the event occurs.

Thus, in deciding whether a given medically unexplained cure is miraculous, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints does not merely note the absence of a medical explanation for what has been observed as fact. It verifies, by reasonable means, that the cure occurred some identifiable time after the proposed saint's intercession was invoked in faith for the purpose. In this sort of case, that is the spiritual context in which the event must have occurred in order to be counted as a miracle in the relevant sense. And so, in addition to being supernatural in the general, ontological sense I've already specified, the miracle must be supernatural in an epistemological sense: it must be seen as such by the eyes of faith. Since that is how miracles are presented in Scripture and Tradition, as well as by the experience of the faithful, I see no need to defend my claim beyond noting its status in those sources.

To answer the question I labeled above as (1), therefore, we should say that a miracle is a event "beyond the order" of nature that is seen as such by the eyes of faith, in such a way as to signify God's love and power to those with eyes to see. That's what it means to call an event a miracle in the relevant, craftbound sense; that's the intension of the relevant concept of the miraculous. To answer the question I labeled above as (2), therefore, we should say that we "may" count, and thus are justified in counting, an observable event E as a miracle in the relevant sense when it can be shown (a) that there is no scientific explanation for it, and (b) that it occurs in a spiritual context suggesting that no such explanation would be of the appropriate sort for E. That's what gives us the extension of the concept of the miraculous.

Now if all that is so, then regarding some event E as a miracle in the relevant sense is not merely to classify E. It is to classify E in such a way as to imply that only a certain sort of explanation would be appropriate to E and, at the same time, to actually adumbrate such an explanation. No such explanation, of course, could show that E had to occur given what is said to explain it. Miracles in the relevant sense are not mechanical or even stochastic outcomes of the laws of nature working on initial conditions; nor are such miracles magic, as if invoking God or the saints could automatically make them happen. They are extraordinary and gratuitous manifestations of divine love and power. But they don't just happen for no reason: they happen either in response to acts of faith or to elicit such acts. So, miracles are indeed explicable to a degree and to the eyes of faith. But the way they're explicable does not and, indeed, cannot show that they have to happen given what explains them. The explanations, at least in principle, are as complete as the nature of the explananda permits, but not exhaustive. Miracles in the relevant sense are thus intelligible but not necessitated. They are what I call "positive" mysteries.

Now if that's what miracles in general are, then Scott's critique of the Vatican's miracle-vetting process simply misses the point. If the concept of the miraculous as I've been limning it even roughly corresponds to the concept the Vatican is following, then we should expect the CCS to verify the absence of scientific explanations for certain cures as part of its vetting process. For miracles in the relevant sense just aren't the sort of thing, ontologically speaking, to which scientific explanation would be appropriate. Of course it does not follow, from the mere absence of a plausible scientific explanation for it, that a given cure is miraculous in the relevant sense. All that follows is that, if the cure is miraculous in the relevant sense, then no such explanation could be relevant even if offered. Thus the absence of such an explanation is, itself, one kind of evidence needed in order to be justified in claiming that some event proposed as a miracle in the relevant sense is, in fact, such a miracle. It is not sufficient evidence by itself, but it is necessary.

Why it's good that sin makes us stupider

I say 'stupider' only a bit tongue-in-cheek because, of course, we're all stupid enough to sin once we're old enough to be capable of it. But every day, smart, accomplished people throw away all that they've worked very hard for simply because they couldn't resist doing a wrong they rationalized as an entitlement, or at least as an ultimately victimless indulgence. I know because I did that myself, in particularly self-deceptive form, and gradually ruined both my career and my mental health in the process. But sometimes the mind has to cripple itself before one can do the smartest thing: letting God back in. That also happened to me. I hope it's what will happen to now-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

Despite all the crowing in the conservative media, I cannot feel contempt for Spitzer, who was a Harvard-Law classmate of a couple of Catholics I know personally. That's not to deny that he was a rank hypocrite as well as an enthusiastic supporter of baby-killing. We hated his being governor. And I agree with his erstwhile professor, Susan Estrich—another liberal Democrat and Clintonite whom I cannot abide politically—when she argues that Spitzer's fall, and the reasons for it, merit the adjective she uses: "insane." But I strongly suspect that, for the sake of his immortal soul, his fall is probably the best thing that could have happened to him.

Why, Estrich rightly asks, would a highly successful and not-bad-looking man like Spitzer pay handsomely for sex and, at the same time, leave his tracks uncovered for the very sort of zealous prosecutor he once was? If it was just that he couldn't resist adultery, plenty of attractive women would gladly have obliged him for nothing; and he knew perfectly well how not to get caught cheating in any case. Estrich is probably right that the prostitution ring's name says it all: "The Emperor's Club." Once a man gets rich and/or powerful enough, he inhabits a world where he could, if he chooses, get away with a lot more than an ordinary schlump could. Spitzer thought of himself as an emperor and acted accordingly—even going so far as to do, and get caught doing, what he had once jailed others for doing. He should have been savvy enough to realize that, with all the enemies he had made, somebody powerful would be out for a "gotcha." But he wasn't. He had become an emperor, governor of "the Empire State," and in so thinking of himself made himself stupid. As they say, pride goeth before the fall.

This is why I have no trouble believing the teaching of the Church that even original sin, which we inherit but do not commit, "darkens the intellect." And actual sin reinforces that darkness. The whole cycle of sin makes us need special revelation to learn things that we ought to know by nature. That in turn is why we can be justly held guilty for acting according to a bad conscience. We can ruin our consciences by sinning inveterately, and thus make ourselves guilty no matter how sincerely we act according to conscience. And sometimes the only way that can change is to find ourselves completely humiliated by the consequences.

That's what gives Spitzer his chance for salvation, if he's willing to take it. It's not a good sign that he trotted his wife out to the podium to share the humiliation with him. But we shall see. I'd love to see where he's at five or ten years from now.

A truly nasty two-step

This article sums up my view of "the Palestinian problem" right now.

Things get nastier all the time. How long, O Lord?

Why do Europeans refuse to reproduce?

Watch this 8-minute video.

Is America that far behind?

Carson et al on the miraculous

In a New York Times Op-Ed piece on Sunday, March 3, Jesuit Father James Martin explained and defended the vetting process the Vatican follows in its investigations into causes for the canonization of saints. He also made some recommendations for improving its already-considerable credibility. Over at An Examined Life, my friend Professor Scott Carson responded with a sympathetic but rather critical piece questioning Fr. Martin's reasoning with regard to the vetting of specifically medical miracles. A combox discussion ensued between Scott, Fr. Martin, and Justin Catanoso, a business-journal editor and journalism professor who took the occasion of his cousin Gaetano's canonization to write a book, My Cousin the Saint, that will be published in May. (You can hear the recent NPR interview with Justin here.) While sympathetic to Scott's concerns, I want to respond to them in a way that will bring out the true utility of the Vatican's approach to miracles of healing.

Two things cause me to write about this particular topic now. One is personal. Several years ago, I made an effort to meet Justin Catanoso, who lives and works close to where I was living and working at the time. What had aroused my interest was an article he had published about St. Gaetano somewhere. I wanted to discuss religion with him, as well as get his help with job networking, since there were few people better acquainted with the local business world. He seemed like somebody who would be a good and interesting friend for another educated Italian-American guy to have. I called him and we arranged a meeting; but the next day, my car broke down. Since it would take me two weeks to come up with the dough for the needed repair, I called Justin to cancel. We haven't had any contact since; but now I have a hunch that that could and should change.

The other reason I have for writing about Scott's take on miracles now is that I've been thinking again lately about the relationship between having reason enough to believe and having faith. The two do not seem to be the same, yet it also seems obvious that they have something important to do with each other. As the late Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote:

Here people might take up one of two opposite positions, both of which I think are wrong. They might say (a) that having faith in a proposition has nothing whatever to do with having reasons for it, or else they might say (b) that it is exactly the same as having reasons for it.

McCabe goes on to show that "[t]he first extreme makes the notion of truth inapplicable" and "[t]he other makes the notion of faith inapplicable." Since both are applicable, the correct account lies somewhere between the extremes. But rather than explicate the middle way by discussing a text that few readers are likely to possess, I turn my attention to Scott's position on miracles. I suspect the truth can be brought out more conveniently that way.

Stimulated by the aforementioned combox discussion, Scott followed up with a post entitled The Miraculous: Explanans or Explanandum? (For those of you unfamiliar with analytical philosophy of science, I note that the term explanans means "something that explains," in the sense of something that can be cited in order to explain something else, and explanandum means "something to be explained.") Scott writes:

My central worry in the earlier post was principally a methodological one, because I certainly do not deny that miracles occur. Indeed, I gave examples, in that earlier entry, of miracles that I believe occur every day. My worry is rather over the quasi-empirical condition put on canonization in the new document from the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints. As the discussion with Justin and Fr. Martin unfolded, it became clear to me that there was a minor equivocation taking place on the notion of explanation, as well as on the relation between the miraculous as a phenomenon to be explained (i.e., the miraculous qua explanandum) and the miraculous as phenomenon invoked as explanation (i.e., the miraculous qua explanans). In this entry I'd like to sort some things out with respect to that relation.

OK, so what comes out of the sorting?

If I read him correctly, Scott is arguing that the lack of a scientific explanation for a given healing or recovery is not merely insufficient reason to call the event a miracle—which I do not dispute—but is actually irrelevant to deciding the question whether it's a miracle. That's because even

...the unanimous agreement of medical experts that there is no physicalist explanation for this cure is no more significant than the unanimous agreement of physicists that we don't know whether there is a black hole at the center of each and every galaxy in the universe. The lack of a scientific consensus on a given question does not entail that there never will be such a consensus, or that there could not be one in principle.

That, I believe, is going too far. The lack of a "physicalist explanation" for a given cure is certainly not sufficient for calling the cure a "miracle" in some theologically significant sense of that term; but equally certainly, such a lack is necessary for calling the cure miraculous in such a sense. Thus it is a reason to do so. It is just not reason enough in itself.

As Scott recognizes, though, there is a difficulty about the status of miracles in explanation. Are miracles explanantia, things that explain something, or are they explananda, things to be explained? If all we have to go on is the absence of naturalistic explanation for a given cure, that does not suffice to establish that the cure was miraculous in a theologically significant sense—typically, as the extraordinary and direct action of God, performed for some spiritual purpose. And if that's the case, then one is not yet in a position to cite the cure's being a miracle in that sense as an explanation for the lack of a naturalistic explanation. By the same token, if the cure really is a miracle in the relevant sense, pointing out as much does not so much explain the cure as classify it. So calling some event a miracle does not, just in itself, explain the event even if one is justified in calling it a miracle in the relevant sense. Miracles are not, just by themselves, explanantia.

Very well: in what sense could extraordinary events be explananda, events to be explained precisely as miracles? Believers, and those on the way to faith, often explain miracles as events God brings about to confirm or elicit faith. That much is right there in the Bible, and I believe that to be true. But the same could be said of other things that there is no compelling reason to call miraculous; so, observing miracles is not, in general, necessary as a way of confirming or eliciting faith. Nor is it sufficient; otherwise everybody who witnesses a miracle in the relevant sense would be confirmed in or brought to faith, which is manifestly not the case. So I think Scott is right when he writes that "To say that an event is a miracle is manifestly not to explain it..." But I don't think his next clause follows, either from what I have just quoted him as saying or from any considerations adduced by either of us. It does not follow that calling something a miracle, if indeed that is what it is, is "to declare it inexplicable."

If Christianity is true, then miracles not only occur, but can be and sometimes are helpful for getting people to see reality more clearly than before. It would seem that Scott recognizes that. He writes:

....what we ought to say depends upon how we interpret the world. If we are religious--in particular, if we are Catholics, for whom God's Incarnation is just one of infinitely many ways in which our world is shot through with God's literal presence among us--then there will be cases where it will be within the "rules of the language game", as it were, for us to declare that some phenomena are "miraculous", by which we mean not merely that we can find no "scientific" explanation for them, but that we believe that we can see the mind--and hand--of God at work in the event in a way that we do not always notice it in other events.

It's important to point out here that the following "rules of the language game" as Scott describes is cognitively quite significant. Seeing the hand of God at work in some extraordinary event, thus regarding it as a miracle in a theologically significant sense, is not just playing a language-game. It is a way of forming a belief that, in turn, either elicits assent to a wider and quite powerful set of beliefs or confirms one in holding that set. One thus maintains the particular belief about the miraculous event, and the set of beliefs thereby confirmed, as true. That's part of what it is to play the language-game being specified. Accordingly, coming to see some extraordinary event, inexplicable in purely naturalistic terms, as a miracle in the relevant sense is not to declare the event "inexplicable" full stop. It is to explain the event in terms of a wider, non-scientific set of beliefs within which regarding the event as a miracle makes sense. So miracles are certainly explananda within a cognitively significant language-game, even if the mere act of classifying an event as a miracle explains nothing in itself.

At the same time, miracles function to an extent as explanantia, as a kind of explanation, within that language-game. If one observes a given extraordinary event and comes to see it as a miracle in the relevant sense, then that constitutes a reason for one to assent to the Faith, so that such a reason in turn constitutes part of one's explanation why one assents to the Faith. This is not to deny that, in general and in themselves, such reasons are neither necessary or sufficient for the assent of faith. But they can help people make or maintain that assent, and in some cases they do just that. So miracles can be cited to explain faith, and in that sense they can function as explanantia. But I would go further.

If one comes to see and affirm a given event E as a miracle in the relevant sense, then one commits oneself to holding that there is a non-naturalistic explanation of E's occurrence. Thus, even if one can't actually give such an explanation, the very act of classifying E as a miracle in the relevant sense commits one to holding that, whatever the explanation may be, it is an explanation of a certain sort. I have my own theory about what that sort is. Miracles like those Scott has been discussing are among God's personal, unritualized sacraments: they are both signs and instruments of what divine grace does in general for us, and they help to bring about what they signify. But whether you like that theory or not, no believing Catholic can, as such, deny that miracles function as some sort of explanantia within the Catholic "language-game," just as they are explananda in another way I've described.

The larger lesson here is about the relationship between reason and faith. "Reason" alone, as a faculty, can never "prove" that any proposition belonging to the deposit of faith is true. It cannot even prove, in any given case, that an event lacking a natural explanation has a supernatural explanation instead. But some events, ideas, and people can constitute reasons, within a set of converging reasons, for making the assent of faith to the deposit as a whole, thus showing such an assent to be reasonable even though not intellectually compelled.

Naturalistically inexplicable healings, such as those discussed by Scott, Fr. Martin, and Justin, can certainly count as such reasons under certain conditions well-attested by Catholic (and Orthodox) tradition. In themselves, they are not probative; but for those who "get it," they confirm faith. And that's what the Vatican's miracle-vetting process is designed to help us do. By eliminating naturalistic explanations as far as possible, the process enables the Church to establish one necessary condition for seeing a dead person as so close to God that invoking their intercession can bring the hand of God down to us in an extraordinary way. That supports McCable's "middle position." Faith requires believing that certain extraordinary things have occurred and are the direct work of God; reason helps us to identify what those might be.

On Evil and Omnipotence

Many moons ago my undergraduate philosophy-of-religion professor, Jonathan Malino (now at Guilford College), assigned as the course's main text an anthology that is still in print today. One of the essays in that anthology was J.L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (Mind 64, No. 244 [1955])—a classic restatement of the problem of evil still so much in academic circulation that, fifty-three years after its initial publication and twenty-eight years after its author's death, there is no way even to see the text online without paying somebody for the privilege. (Check out this Google search page for it.) It is no exaggeration to say that nearly all subsequent work on the problem of evil by philosophers writing in English addresses the problem as Mackie formulated it. What is not yet widely known, however, is that the English Dominican Herbert McCabe, who died in 2001, came up with a reply that, in my opinion, is the best so far.

That essay, "On Evil and Omnipotence," is contained in a posthumous collection of previously unpublished work entitled Faith Within Reason, published a year ago. My aim here to is describe McCabe's argumentative strategy well enough to bring out its importance for readers interested in this sort of thing. You might even buy the anthologies.

Since I'm too lazy to type out Mackie's description of the problem, I shall content myself with that of (now ex-) atheist Antony Flew, who wrote in the same year as Mackie: "Either God cannot abolish evil or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not then he is not all-good." McCabe also quotes that, which is good enough for his own purposes. What is the theist to reply?

The most common reply is the so-called "Free Will Defense," whose main proponent among philosophers for the past generation has been Alvin Plantinga. The main thesis of the FWD is that it is logically impossible for God to create beings who make free choices while ensuring that such creatures make no evil choices; hence, God cannot be blamed for the evil that we freely do, or for its having the natural consequences it does. Now rather than review Plantinga's intricate version, or other versions of the FWD, I point out that, like Mackie and Flew, McCabe considers the whole idea "worthless." I agree. What's his argument?

As is its wont, one of the best theology blogs out there reviewed FWR as soon as it came out. The reviewer, Protestant pastor Kim Fabricius, is somebody with whose views I am often unsympathetic; but in this case, he's right on target. Thus:

McCabe says RIP to the theodicist’s free-will defence, agreeing with Antony Flew that it is “worthless”, but disagreeing why. It is not, as Flew argues, because freedom is not incompatible with determinism – it is, insists McCabe – but rather because there is a mistaken understanding of freedom at work here, namely that God’s activity and ours are in competition, as if (as I would put it) freedom were a zero-sum game. But as McCabe states: “The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature – a part of the world.”

Quite so. My freedom of action varies inversely with the causal influence other creatures have on me; but God is not a creature, and the relation between his causal activity and mine is not a zero-sum game. God's general causal activity does not consist in making creatures act thus and not otherwise in any particular instance; rather, he creates them both as beings of such-and-such sorts and in their actuality, which includes their activity. God actively and continuously bestows being-as-actuality on us, and in that sense causes even what we do freely. (From the standpoint of theology strictly so-called, a big advantage of McCabe's view, which is essentially that of Aquinas, is how it undergirds "synergism.") Accordingly, the question whether we exercise free will does not, in general, have anything to do with God's degree of causal influence on us, as if it made sense to measure such a thing like we do in the case of creatures. In his general governance of the world, God causes us and our actions in the same way and to the same extent, even granted that some of our actions are free. (Of course that claim depends on the assumption that, as a conceptual matter, causation need not always consist in necessitation—but I don't think such an idea is as controversial today as it was fifty years ago, when Elizabeth Anscombe re-introduced it.) And so it is just wrongheaded to say that it's impossible for God to create a world in which rational creatures always but freely choose what's good. It is perfectly compatible with human freedom that God create such a world, even though he has not in fact created most of us like that.

Such an account does not have freedom being compatible with determinism—the thesis that whatever we do is necessitated, and thus determined, by factors outside our control. For to act freely is, among other things, to have determined for oneself at least one of one's motives for acting thus-and-such. But it does make human freedom compatible with our being predestined to do only what's good; for in such a scheme, free will is exercised only within the ambit of what's good, and not as a choice between doing good and doing evil. Such, after all, is the freedom of God, both in himself and as incarnate in Christ; and that's the kind of freedom in which the blessed in heaven participate. Such indeed is an indispensable component of the very goal of the Christian life, even if those of us in via haven't got there yet and enjoy only that immature freedom for which sin is still very much a possibility. Hence the FWD, which entails the claim that freedom is incompatible with predestination to the good alone, won't do.

What, then, is McCabe's defense against the problem of evil? It comes in three parts.

The first is to narrow down the problem. In discussing the problem of evil, it is common to distinguish between "natural" and "moral" evil. McCabe simplifies that by labeling it the distinction between "evil suffered" and "evil done." And he says that evil suffered does not pose a "problem" of evil at all. That's because it is in the very nature of physical reality that evil suffered be strictly relative: evil is suffered by some creatures as the good of others or of the whole. To use McCabe's examples: it's bad for the lamb to be eaten and thus die, but it sure is good for the lion doing the eating; getting sick from an infection, which is bad for us, is positive fulfillment for the little pathogens. That's how it is with Nature, including evolution. To suppose that the material world is evil just for being like that, inferring therefrom that the creator of such a world is evil, is to agree with the Manichees that biological life, merely as such, is evil. McCabe says that the Manichean thesis would be "very difficult to show." I would go further: St. Augustine showed why it's untenable.

For McCabe, the problem is not with evil suffered but with evil done. He poses the question thus (FWR, p. 82; I've added the bullets):

If we can reconcile human wickedness with the goodness of God, then the explanation will certainly cover pain as well. If it is true, as I have maintained, that my free acts are due to God, what about my sins? If God has planned and arranged everything, then it is unfair to make me sin and then send me to hell. I am now going to offer the following propositions:

• Although God acts in all my activity, free and unfree, he does not make me sin
• He does not send me to hell, although he does send people to heaven
• He could prevent me from sinning, and hence prevent me from going to hell, but does not always do so; yet this does not make him guilty.

The second stage of McCabe's defense is his argument for those propositions. Therein he relies on the Augustinian idea of evil as privatio boni, as an absence of what ought to be there. As Rev. Fabricius notes:

McCabe is...excellent on evil as a privatio boni – and at his best with the funny example. Some people, he writes, assume that when we have described evil as a negation we are saying that evil isn’t real. “But we (or I anyway) do not mean this at all. If I have a hole in my sock, the badness of this consists in the absence of wool where there ought to be some. This does not mean that the badness is illusory or unreal. If I jump out of a plane and discover that I have not got a parachute, it is of no comfort at all to be told that the absence of the parachute is not a real thing at all.”

So evil as privation is quite real. But God does not cause the "absence" in an evil action, which absence McCabe calls the "failure" of something to be there that, for the sake of the rational agent's humanity, ought to be there. He goes on:

Now my sins may involve a great deal of activity, but it is never the activity that makes us call them sins. What makes them sins is that this activity amounts to a failure in human living...a failure to behave in the way that human beings ought to behave. Now we can certainly say that God is acting in all the activity that is involved in sinning, but he is equally certainly not acting in the failure which constitutes the sin itself.

McCabe recognizes, of course, that some people charge God with "neglect" in permitting such failures when he could prevent them. McCabe's reply to that charge is the third main stage of his argument, and the part of his paper that most interests me.

After a page or so of explanation and argument, which it's important to read, he says:

When, therefore, I act in a less-than-human way, this is a failure on my part because acting in a human way is what I am for. But the fact that God has not made me act in a human way is not a failure on his part because this is not what he is for. It needs a kind of cosmic megalomania to suppose that God has the job of saving my soul and is to be given bad marks if he does not do that. Whatever he does for us, like creating us in the first place, is an act of gratuitous love, not something that is demanded of him.

Now such a view of God naturally elicits the further question what it could mean that God is good, if that does not mean that he acts as he ought by doing what he is for. McCabe's answer seems unassailable to me. But as this post is too long already, you'll have to read that for yourself.

As Fabricius points out:

...McCabe concludes modestly. He hopes to have “disentangled a puzzle,” but “When all is said and done, we are left with an irrational but strong feeling that if we were God we would have acted differently. Perhaps one of his reasons for acting as he did is to warn us not to try to make him in our own image.”

I believe that the modesty of such a result is actually a virtue. As I argued in my own paper The Problems of Evil, the best the philosopher or theologian can and should do with the problem of evil is to come up with a "defense": to show that the problem is not a logical one of inconsistency among the propositions held by the classical theist. That's a defense against the Mackies of the world. But a theodicy, which would mean showing why God is actually justified in permitting most of us to do evil and all of us to suffer it, is neither possible from any standpoint nor desirable from the standpoint of divine revelation. All we can do is glory in the person and action of Christ as the greatest conceivable manifestation of divine love. No doubt many of us, including yours truly, are inclined to say that, if they were God, they would have acted differently. Yet the very oddity of such a statement is evidence, as if we needed it, that we are out of our depth before God.

Catholic nerdity

I don't know about you, but my mind needs a rest from time to time. Here's a pause that refreshes.

You know you're a Catholic nerd IF:

• you feel challenged by Catholics who see no irony in considering themselves more Catholic than the Pope.

• at Mass, you find yourself mouthing sotto voce a prayer prescribed for the priest, only to be horrified by his ad-libbing.

• you're disappointed that the Church doesn't have an official position on every controversial issue.

• you have nightmares about defending the faith from angry, liberal Catholic women. (Bonus nerd points if the nightmares are no worse than the reality.)

• a public exhibition near you of rare relics of saints is your idea of a hot date spot.

• you've taught in a seminary that had refused to accept you as a student.

• you feel guilty about forgetting to thank God for your sufferings.

Since seven is the number signifying perfection, I shall stop there. Of course there could be more, lots more. After all, I needn't remind my regular readers whose life the above items are drawn from.

Enjoy. And if you care to, add some!

News, notes, and questions

Well, I'm back from my interview in DC. As much because as in spite of my limitations, the Holy Spirit let them know I belonged there with them. I just hope they surrender. I have one more phone interview to go; I should know within a week. Tonight I begin my novena to St. Joseph for this and related intentions. Thanks to those of you who have joined me in prayer.

Before I blog on any given day, I spend 20-30 minutes reviewing Catholic news. Two items I found today spur me to comment.

The first is an article about men's spirituality: How real men can be real Catholics. The occasion was the 2nd annual "Men of Christ" conference held near Milwaukee. What one priest there was quoted as saying sounded manly enough: "To be holy is to be real," Fr. Larry Richards of Relevant Radio told the gathering. "We don't need any more pansies following Jesus; we need men!" And: "If you don't eat, you die; if you don't pray, you die," he said, reminding them to spend time reading the Bible every day." Perhaps Fr. Richards also reminded the men of how fond St. Paul was of athletic metaphors. Then again, perhaps not. What impact could it have had?

I wasn't there, so I concede I missed a lot. But the "real men" the reporter chose to quote were, respectively, "a buyer for an automotive tool and equipment warehouse"; the "vice president of finance for Aurora Health Care,"; a teenage confirmation candidate; and a man who is "head of his own construction company." In other words, "good guys," the kinds of guys who elicit the moral approval of wives and parents, not least because they make or will make pretty decent money. All that they said was edifying enough; but I found myself asking: "What are these guys saying that sincerely Christian women could not just as well say for themselves?" What struck me is how generic the lay spirituality was, at least as presented. And of course there seemed to be nothing explicitly Christian about how they actually spend most of their time. Their orientation to discipleship makes itself felt in using their occupations as occasions to practice Christian virtue: e.g., treating people on the job fairly and lovingly. All that is quite necessary, to be sure. But in the article I saw no hint, other than the possibility of priesthood for the still-unmarried minority, of how Catholic men might be explicit witnesses to Christ above and beyond becoming better, i.e. holier, men while continuing to spend their time just as they already do. Isn't there more to it than that? (Don't tell me about paid "lay ministry", which I once did myself. Most of those jobs are, for good reason, held by women who are not their families' primary breadwinners, and there really aren't that many such jobs to go around.)

The other news item helps to answer that question. I'm proud to report it.

Belmont Abbey College, where I attend Mass and do other things, has just requested that its health-insurance carrier drop coverage for "abortion, contraception, and voluntary sterilization." According to President Bill Thierfelder, who has at least six kids, "eight faculty members filed formal complaints with various state and federal agencies, demanding the reinstatement of these coverages." There will doubtless be other repercussions. This is the sort of thing that lay male professionals need to be doing on the job. Witness takes real courage.

Pray for work

Friends, I'll be away this weekend for a job interview. This is important to me. I believe the wind of the Spirit is at my back. A couple of my friends in Communion and Liberation need suitable work too. Please weigh in with St. Joseph along with us. I'll be back Monday.

Atheism for children

I'm sure all of you have heard of Philip Pullman and the movie The Golden Compass, even if you haven't had occasion to sample his book series or the movie. The mysterious villian in GC is called "the Magisterium." You get the idea, even if the undercatechized Catholic Nicole Kidman does not. Pullman's stuff is slickly packaged atheism for children. Since the movie came out he's tried to hide that, but the cat had already been let out of the bag.

For those who want to help parents inoculate their kids, I recommend the 100-page book Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy, by Pete Vere and Sandra Meisel. The introduction is written by Carl Olson, who had co-authored with Meisel a decent-selling book debunking Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. You remember that row, don't you?

Pope to rehabilitate Luther???

The London Times says yes. But like its establishment counterpart the BBC, the Times has a target-rich record of error in reporting Catholic affairs.

In this case, CWN points out and proves that the article manages to "cram three significant errors of fact into a single sentence." I challenge readers to find that sentence without reading the CWN analysis first. The Times' credibility about the Catholic Church has sunk to a new low.

Pay no attention to that reporter behind the curtain.

Fun the morning after

(Augmented on 3/7. New text in bold.)

Since this is a presidential election year, I'm posting a lot more often about politics than I usually do. I know that many conservatives are tempted to sit out this November, and I understand. I disagree with them, of course; I'm going to vote for McCain, for reasons I've explained before. But I want to urge conservatives, indeed Republicans generally, to enjoy themselves as hugely as they are being enabled to by how the Democrats are doing.

Last night, the Republicans had the best primary outcome they could hope for. McCain clinched the nomination, prompting Huckabee to do what he said he would do: drop out gracefully when the math became clear. But more important and less predictably, the Democratic race was extended—probably all the way to the convention. The battle will only get nastier in weeks ahead, which can only help the Republicans, who are now in the process of uniting behind the de facto nominee. Even more important than its getting nastier, however, is why and how it is getting nastier.

Hearken to a member of the chattering classes of whose person, and views, I am generally most dubious: liberal Democrat Maureen Dowd. In her NYT column this morning, she writes:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”

And meanwhile, the conventional white man sits on the Republican side and enjoys the spectacle of the Democrats’ identity pileup and victim lock.

Well, I'm not a conventional white man; if I were, I'd be pursuing a demanding, unfulfilling career just because it pays more or less the amount of money that conventional people seem to expect of me. But I am very much enjoying "the spectacle of the Democrats' identity pileup and victim lock." Dowd forgot to add that when they get out of their cars, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

There's more: the wine track vs. the beer track. Obama wins among upscale professionals; Clinton wins among working-class whites. That's a cultural clash; those are usually bitter and always linger. Then there's the generational divide: Obama wins the young people, Clinton the retired. For the pièce de resistance, there's the Florida-Michigan cockup. On the one hand, it's "unfair" not to "make every vote count"; on the other, it's "unfair" to "change the rules in the middle of the game." Whatever. It's also likely the race will be decided by the superdelegates, the professional pols who at this point cannot escape sorting out all these intractables. If they settle on a nominee in spite of the popular vote, the cry from the losing side will be that the Democratic Party is not democratic. Yet if they settle on a nominee simply on the basis of the popular vote, they will be reduced to irrelevant rubber-stampers, which was not the role envisioned for them and will be impossible anyhow if there's any meaningful disparity between the popular vote and the elected-delegate count. Nor can the race be prettified by trying to settle it on the substantive issues; the differences thereon are not great and do not arouse the passion. Yessiree: whoever wins will win ugly.

As two wars continue and the economy sinks into the doldrums, the Democratic battle is the best hope McCain has in the fall. It is the natural outcome of how that party has been developing for the last several decades. For me, that movie is better entertainment than anything Hollywood is likely to offer between now and then. Even those conservatives who plan to sit back and hold their noses would do well to enjoy the movie for free.

Development and Negation VIII: Slavery

Many of you are familiar with my "Development and Negation" series, which I've condensed into a Google document accessible by the link in the sidebar under "Articles of Mine." For those who aren't familar with the series, I note that the salient issue comes up over and over again, case by hoary case. It's time to deal with another case.

Generally speaking, the impression is widespread that Catholicism's

...own course of doctrinal development belies the Church’s claims for her teaching authority, which themselves belong to that course of development. The Church claims that her “definitive” teaching—according to either the extraordinary or the ordinary magisterium—has been taught infallibly: in its solemn exercise, the magisterium is preserved from error in virtue of that divine infallibility in which Christ bestowed a share on the Church. But such a claim would be exposed as mere effrontery if it could be shown that, in the case of even one teaching that the Church has definitively proposed as belonging to the deposit of faith, she has formally or materially reversed herself on precisely the definitive point.

In defense of the Magisterium, I addressed six well-known cases in my series. But one that I neglected is slavery.

I neglected it because I assumed that Cardinal Avery Dulles had already addressed it effectively enough in a review article, "Development or Reversal?", about John Noonan's important 2005 book A Church That Can and Cannot Change. The main topics that Noonan, and perforce Dulles, addressed were slavery, usury, religious freedom, and marriage, with slavery getting by far the most treatment because Noonan had previously addressed the others elsewhere. Although I had learned much from Noonan on those others when I addressed them myself, and find his scholarship about the Church on slavery useful as well, I concur with Dulles in rejecting Noonan's conclusion that the Church has effectively reversed her traditional teaching on slavery. Yet now that the most notorious prog theologian in the blogosphere, Joseph O'Leary, has pressed the slavery issue by means of a direct rebuttal of Dulles, I see an occasion to address it myself. Such a treatment will be needed in the book I plan to turn the series into, if I can manage to interest a Catholic publisher in it. (So far I've sent a proposal to three, and been ignored.) Such a book, it seems to me and to several other Catholic authors, is itself badly needed.

It would seem that the Church got tougher on slavery under the papacy of John Paul the Great. Dulles notes:

Speaking at the infamous “House of Slaves” on the Island of Gorée in Senegal, from which innumerable slaves had been exported, [JP2] declared: “It is fitting to confess in all truth and humility this sin of man against man, this sin of man against God.” Noonan adds: “What this confession did not remark was how recently the sin had been discovered.”

But as Dulles points out:

...if we look up the quotation, we will find that the pope is here speaking of the slave trade, which had repeatedly been condemned. Far from changing the doctrine, John Paul is explicitly reaffirming the position of Pope Pius II, whom he quotes as having declared in 1492 that the slave trade was an enormous crime, magnum scelus.

Of course Noonan has a stronger argument for doctrinal discontinuity than that. Again, Dulles (emphasis added by me):

In 1993, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II took, from Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, a long list of social evils: “homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide . . . mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as sub-human living conditions, arbitrary imprisonments, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons.” Where Vatican II had called these practices “shameful” (probra), John Paul II calls them “intrinsically evil.” In the same encyclical the pope teaches that intrinsically evil acts are prohibited always and everywhere, without any exception.

The central question here is what, exactly, the Pope was condemning when he condemned "slavery" as "intrinsically evil." Was it just the slave trade—which the Church has quite consistently condemned for centuries? Was it just certain practices by which servitude is enforced, such as violence, family separations, and rape? Or was it, purely and simply, all forms of involuntary servitude?

Here, I must agree with Dulles' observation that

...if [JP2] had wanted to assert his position as definitive he would have had to say more clearly how he was defining slavery. He would have had to make it clear that he was rejecting the nuanced views of the biblical writers and Catholic theologians for so many past centuries. If any form of slavery could be justified under any conditions, slavery as such would not be, in the technical sense, intrinsically evil.

That is not only true but crucial. If the Pope had been condemning all forms of involuntary servitude as intrinsically evil—and thus as prohibited always and necessarily, regardless of motive, further intention, circumstances, or likely consequences—then even involuntary penal servitude would be prohibited. Thus, forcing imprisoned convicts to pick up trash along roadsides, or make license plates, would be intrinsically evil. I don't think a case can be made that the Pope was implying that, let alone saying it. But if we read JP2 as Noonan and O'Leary do, we would have to say that he was implying that. By the same token, we would have to say that popes who used Muslim prisoners of war to man the oars of Christian galleys were doing an intrinsic evil. Still more radically, we would have to say that slave owners who do not forthwith manumit their slaves are committing an intrinsic evil, regardless of how the slaves were acquired or why they are retained. That was a serious issue for English-speaking Catholics, as well as Protestants, in the mid-19th century, including and especially America. But neither St. Paul nor the Church prior to John Paul II ever went that far.

I don't believe we must say that even John Paul II went that far. Given the data of historic Church teaching that Noonan and Dulles both accept as data, the fairest conclusion is that the Pope was condemning as intrinsically evil not any and all involuntary servitude, but rather any attempt to force innocent people into servitude. That, at any rate, is a quite a reasonable way to make his position continuous with historic Church teaching. Why, then, interpret JP2's words in such a way as to make them discontinuous with said teaching?

As both Noonan's book and Dulles' reply suggest, the reasoning of the discontinuants seems to be by analogy with the development of doctrine on religious freedom. It took the Church over 1,500 years, spanning the fourth to the twentieth centuries, to formally recognize that any attempt to coerce adult consciences into professing the true faith is intrinsically evil. During those prior centuries, by contrast, heresy was punished as a civil crime because Catholicism was the spiritual premise of the social and political order. That led to well-known forms of persecution which the Church now condemns as intrinsically evil, even though some popes explicitly authorized them. So, does it not seem that the same sort of development occurred under John Paul II regarding slavery?

Frankly, the analogy doesn't hold up because its terms have not been adequately stated. When the Church condemns efforts to coerce consciences, she does not condemn the establishment of the true religion by the state. She does not even condemn the punishment of heresy. What she condemns is any effort to force people to change their minds about questions of religious truth. And she condemns it because, by the logic of her own account of the virtue of faith, such a thing is objectively impossible and hence can only be a gratuitous violation of basic human liberty. The same cannot be said about penal servitude, or about keeping slaves until the time is ripe for their manumission.

So, the hermeneutic of discontinuity is no more credible in the case of slavery than it is in the case of religious freedom. The Church has indeed changed her approach to those issues to some extent; it would be foolish as well as dishonest to deny that. But there is no good evidence that such developments have negated anything the Church has ever taught with her full authority.

Baptism with gender-neutral language ruled invalid

So indicates the CDF, which settles it. Amy Welborn has a good post up about it.

Why this and why now? As in the case of women's ordination, Rome is concerned to maintain the gender-symbolic integrity of the sacraments. Jesus did not refer to himself as "the Son," and to God the Father as "Father," just to mollify "the culture." The Jews were and had long been surrounded by cultures with female deities and with priestesses. No, there's a point here that God, unsurprisingly, understands better than we. Today more than ever, people should not be allowed to forget it.

Display issues

Dear readers, I had to remove the lush graphical background of this blog because changes Blogger made to the XML elements of the template were incompatible with it and thus ruined the post display in Firefox and Safari. All the other content remains.

I'm hoping that my IT guru can take time from his busy schedule to figure out how to restore the old background compatibly with the new Blogger layout.